Make room for Daddy--and Poppa

With help from science and society, a growing number of gay couples are choosing parenthood

March 24, 2002|By Grant Pick. Grant Pick is a Chicago writer whose last article for the Magazine was on the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education program.

Rosinia's immediate family have embraced the situation. "My mother, who's in her 70s, would never have chosen for me to be a lesbian," says Rosinia, "but she can see that Jennifer and I are happy, and she's pleased to have another grandchild." Rosinia's brother Jeff, a bank real-estate analyst, praises the two new mothers. "[They] are working together to make a family, and I think it's great. You will always come across people who are close-minded about this, but it's ignorance more than anything else."

Cowan and Rosinia say they are mindful that Logan doesn't have a father, and they are grateful for the nearness of both Jeff Rosinia and two gay men who serve as the boy's godfathers. The men, who requested anonymity, participate in a Christian faith-sharing group with Cowan and Rosinia. "I like sports, and I'll teach Logan piano," promises one godfather, a teacher. "I've been in therapy to heal from my own childhood experiences, and my insights may prove helpful to the boy."

The two women know they will have to prepare Logan for affronts he will face. "We will discuss with him the fact that people may say ugly things about his family," says Cowan. Rosinia intends to arm him with "appropriate language": "If some kid says, 'Your mom's a lesbian,' he will say, 'Yeah, they are.' " If the insults get worse than that, says Rosinia, "Logan will learn to go to adults who can step in and keep him safe."

In the short term, the two Jennifers are readying the names that they hope Logan will call them--Mama for the Georgia-born Cowan and Mommy for Rosinia--and they're fairly sure that they'll try for a second child.

A 'POST-GAY' WORLD

In spring of 1994, being a father was the furthest notion from Roger McCaffrey's mind. "The thought had never occurred to me," he says. "None of my friends had kids. It [parenting] was some obscure thing that women did."

But one day that year McCaffrey, a lawyer, was deeply moved by a news story about people adopting babies from China. He returned from work to find his partner, Christopher Boss, weeding the yard of the two-flat the pair owned in Oak Park. Walking up the sidewalk in a suit, McCaffrey asked, "Christopher, do you want to go to China and adopt a baby girl?"

"What?" replied a puzzled Boss, then a dental student. Boss had met McCaffrey 18 months before, and they had soon settled into a domestic relationship. Boss, 15 years younger than his partner, had been suppressing his own desire for a child.

In the period after his epiphany, "Christopher and I went back and forth about children," says McCaffrey, who, like his mate, now goes by the name McCaffrey-Boss. "Sometimes I was gung-ho and Christopher was reticent, and then we'd switch." Roger, now 49, had served in Vietnam and had lost many friends to the AIDS epidemic. "Everyone I'd known at a younger age was dead, except for four or five people," he says. "I had written out wills in hospitals. It made me realize that the shallow things I'd been used to--money and clothes and sex--are not very valuable."

The McCaffrey-Bosses investigated adopting from overseas, but they disliked the fact that they would have to hide being gay, at least from international officials, to be successful. They explored surrogacy by placing an ad in the paper inviting prospective birth mothers to phone them.

"We got quite a few calls, but the process proved too much of a roller coaster," says Roger. "We spent two hours on the phone with this one woman over two weeks, but nothing came of it." Moreover, the cost of going through a surrogacy agency, normally between $80,000 and $100,000, seemed prohibitive.

By 1997 they had decided to adopt in Chicago, a path that would cost them just $5,000. "Adoption seemed right, since the biological link isn't what we think being a parent is about," says Roger, "and we could deposit the money we would have spent in a college fund."

The McCaffrey-Bosses applied for an African-American or biracial child through a South Side agency that prefers to remain anonymous. They filled out paperwork, gathered recommendations, took tuberculosis tests and underwent three home visits by a social worker.

That Thanksgiving, Christopher's family was gathered at his and Roger's new Oak Park house when the couple arrived with the new infant, Robert McCaffrey-Boss. Christopher's sister, Alexa Martin, who has a slightly older son of her own, was free with advice: When Robert got fussy, she advised her brother, "You might think about feeding him."

Roger recalls being "shocked and stunned" at the new responsibility of parenthood; Christopher remembers the Thanksgiving as "the happiest day of my life."